90 TIME January 31/February 7, 2022
TIME OFF MOVIES
REVIEW
A wartime thriller for everyone’s inner dad
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
DAD MOVIES, AT LEAST AMONG
those who aren’t actual dads, tend to
be undervalued pleasures; they pluck
a certain satisfying, resonant chord,
often without being particularly
fl ashy. Munich: The Edge of War,
directed by Christian Schwochow
and adapted from Robert Harris’ 2017
novel, is the ultimate dad movie: its
setting is the 1938 Munich conference
in which European leaders met
with Hitler in an earnest, if naive,
attempt to stave off war. That part
really happened. The more intimate
story Munich weaves around that
event—involving two young men, one
German and one English, who attempt
a risky plot to stop Hitler—is largely
fi ction. Yet the made-up narrative
melts seamlessly into the historical
one. If the movie is handsome in an
oak-paneled-offi ce way, there’s life
in it too. You feel there’s something
at stake for the two young would-be
heroes, as there is for the world.
Munich opens in 1932, at a
champagne- fueled Oxford Univer-
sity garden party. Three friends gam-
bol drunkenly on the lawn, noisy in
their adamant youthfulness. One of
handshake and a cup of tea.
Even so, Hugh sees that war is com-
ing. And over in Germany, his old
school friend Paul (Jannis Niewöhner,
thoughtful-looking in a matinee-idol
way) has an even better idea of how
horrible and far-reaching that confl ict
might be. He’s now part of a resistance
group plotting to stop, and maybe even
kill, Hitler. The girlfriend—her name
is Lenya, and she’s played by the mar-
velous, somber-eyed German actor Liv
Lisa Fries, from Babylon Berlin—is no-
where on the scene; we’ll learn of her
sad fate later. Paul and Hugh haven’t
spoken in years, as Paul’s increasingly
bullish nationalistic beliefs became
too much for Hugh to bear. But when
Paul comes into possession of a top-
secret document— it’s slipped to him
by his secretary and lover, Mrs. Winter,
played wonderfully by the sly German
actor Sandra Hüller —he and his old
friend cross paths again, now united
in a plan that seems as doomed as
it is urgent.
Not everything in Munich is particu-
larly subtle. Now and then you’ll hear a
character note with alarm, “Hitler mo-
bilizes tomorrow!” And the actor who
plays the man himself, Ulrich Matthes,
is a little too gaunt to convey much ro-
bust, dangerous charisma (even if his
eyes do radiate a certain magnetic mad-
ness). But the movie gives a sense of
what it’s like to be a human perched on
a particularly sharp ledge of history.
And its fi ctional elements spring from
seeds of reality: Harris has said that
Paul’s character was inspired by the
anti-Nazi German diplomat Adam von
Trott zu Solz, executed in 1944 for his
role in Claus von Stauff enberg’s failed
plot to kill Hitler. Even if Paul doesn’t
suff er the same grim fate in Munich, its
certainty hangs over him like a tense
shadow. Sometimes the things you
don’t see in a movie are as eff ective as
those you do.MUNICH: THE EDGE OF WAR is on Netflix
beginning Jan. 21them, whose slight accent marks him
as someone-not-from-England, ex-
presses his excitement about going
home to what he calls the new Ger-
many. His girlfriend, also German,
protests that it’s a nation “of thugs
and racists.” Their mini-argument
ends with a fl urry of sozzled kisses,
but you know there’s trouble in this
paradise. The third friend, who is Eng-
lish, teases them with amused annoy-
ance, though he’s unsure of what to
make of his best friend’s belligerent
devotion to the fatherland. He also,
it seems, likes the girl.FAST-FORWARD SIX YEARS, and the
young Englishman, Hugh (George
MacKay, putting his scrubbed-clean
innocence to good use), is a husband
and father stuck in a demanding job as
a secretary to Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons, buttoned-
up and terrifi c). At that point, plenty
of people in power are still underesti-
mating Hitler, and Chamberlain isn’t
too worried. As Irons plays him, at
least until the movie’s swerving fi nale,
this PM is a likable doofus, certain
that any problem can be solved with aMUNICH: NETFLIX◁
MacKay and Irons,
hoping to avert war
with diplomacy